Cynthia Sue Larson joins Sandie Sedgbeer to talk about her young adult novel, Karen Kimball and Dream Weaver’s Web, which introduces topics such lucid dreaming and astral travel to children, and explains how we can discuss these topics and more with our children. At a time when so many stories cover magic, Cynthia explains why she was inspired to write about “the real magic” of our natural intuitive skills. Karen Kimball has been called “… an amazing little book, a primer on spirit, magic, and human potential woven into a many-layered mystery story about a ten year old girl–the very age when so many women later in life remember that they gave up their life dreams. Astral travel, spirit friends and foes, indigenous knowledge, telepathic communication—most children hide and then, to their peril, forget such gifts and potentials and so distort their lives. Instead, this heroine discovers and develops these abilities and puts them to use to solve everyday problems and even save lives. We are more than we know, and children deserve the validation of their lives and experiences that this book offers.”

About the Guest Cynthia Sue Larson

CYNTHIA SUE LARSON is a best-selling author, researcher, and transformational speaker who helps people visualize and access whole new worlds of possibility. Cynthia writes and teaches about the science of spirituality, and how consciousness changes the physical world. She has been featured on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, and BBC, and has presented papers at international conferences on science, spirituality, and consciousness. For the past 16 years, Cynthia has shared findings from scientific research in the fields of quantum physics, quantum biology, the placebo effect, positive psychology, sociology, and alternative medicine. Cynthia’s articles have appeared in journals ranging from Cosmos and History, to Magical Blend, to Parabola. Her RealityShifters web site has compiled one of the most extensive collections of reality shift reports in the world, and her popular ezine, RealityShifters, is eagerly awaited each month by thousands of subscribers worldwide. Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, and a Doctor of Divinity. www.realityshifters.com

Raising a child in today’s world is challenging for even the most conscious and loving parents. It is difficult to protect children from outside influences such as the onslaught of television images and Internet temptations. Once children learn to use electronic devices, these dynamics are difficult to control. Parents are perplexed how much to monitor social media exposure to their developing children who often lack discernment what is a beneficial and what is a dangerous influence. Complicating the co-parenting experience is the common confusion for two parents how to role model a secure functioning partnership as they guide a child’s choices, so the growing child feels secure and safe.

Even what used to be natural – such as a simple frolic in the grass – can be challenging when it can have a devastating impact on the health of a child, such as Lyme disease, sun-damaged skin, or pesticides used on the lawn. Feeding children is no longer easy. A wise parent has to watch out for GMOs and chemicals in foods. Growing bodies have to be protected from radiation from cell phones and smart meters. The ability to protect our children from the simple pleasures of life can feel daunting.

So how can you guide and and protect your children from life’s unexpected threats? The answer is by providing them with the basic building blocks of love, which creates secure emotional attachment for everyone. The neuroscience of secure attachment has developed over 20 years of research, and more than 2000 studies on child development. Carista Luminare explains how you can use the accumulated wisdom to guide the optimum development of your child’s well being throughout all stages of a child’s life. Children who experience the power of secure love are more apt to make wise and self-loving choices in their relationship to themselves and others, throughout their life.

And if you had insecure bonding with their parents, it’s never too late to learn about secure attachment with a child or partner.

About the Guest Carista Luminare, Phd

CARISTA LUMINARE, PhD has 30 years experience as a consultant, counselor and coach to parents, individuals, executives, entrepreneurs, and organizations, bringing them into alignment with their highest virtues and their True Self.

After graduating from Harvard University in Psychology and Social Relations Carista pioneered educational programs focused on the integration of the personality and soul. She has developed a comprehensive holistic parenting methodology and integrates into her private practice her lifelong research on childhood attachment, and how our early bonding patterns with our parents profoundly affect our primary adult relationship dynamics. She is the author of the groundbreaking book Parenting Begins Before Conception, excerpts from which are available online at InspiredParentingMagazine.com, and has been featured in a variety of international media. http://www.confusedaboutlove.com

How Animated Cartoons Can Revolutionize The Way Your Children Learn In The Classroom with Terry Thoren

Aired Thursday, 29 October 2015, 7:00 PM ET

Since Felix the cat made its first appearance in 1919, children—and adults—the world over have been enamored with cartoons. Cartoon characters are the biggest stars in entertainment, today appearing in countless TV series, video games and movies. But if you think that cartoon characters have no use beyond entertainment, think again. Terry Thoren has spent decades studying the effects of animation on children. As CEO of CEO of Klasky Csupo, he was the executive in charge of production of 600 shows, overseeing the production of the Rugrats when it was Nickelodeon’s number one animated show, as well as the popular cartoons Rocket Power, The Wild Thornberrys, and the Emmy-nominated As Told by Ginger.

He and his colleagues at Wondergrovelearn.com decided to channel the same passion that young students have for watching cartoons to help develop their language skills, cultivate emotional intelligence, and improve their language acquisition and learning habits and behavior in the classroom. Terry and his team have developed have developed over 200 instructional animations and 1,500 printable extension lessons in Spanish and English, which teachers say are creating astonishing results. Says Terry, “Young students develop language skills rapidly, and they quickly absorb whatever they see and hear in animation. This accelerates their understanding of new words in two different languages at an incredibly fast rate. Research shows when young children form an emotional connection with animated characters they model the behavior of the characters.”

Now parents and homeschoolers have the opportunity to utilize WonderGroveLearn’s cartoon characters at home too.

About the Guest Terry Thoren

TERRY THOREN spent 12 years as the CEO of the animation studio behind Nickolodeon’s world-famous Rugrats and The Wild Thornberrys, and several years as CEO of Teachtown, Inc., which provides education software and other solutions for children with special needs and autism.

WonderGroveLearn™ is a unique education tool, which offers instructional animations, focused on social and emotional learning; life skills and social skills paired with extension lessons for children ages 3 to 8. In addition producing the education website and instructional animations for the “16 Habits of Mind.” Wonder Media produces instructional animation campaigns for large non-profit organizations: including Head Start, the Betty Ford Center Children’s Program, Girl Scouts USA, and the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center to name just a few.

In today’s schools, our children have to be good at everything, but in the real world, they only have to be REALLY good at something. We have to change the message we giving to our children, and especially the ones diagnosed with” learning disorders” because when it’s time to get a job they have a hard time “selling” themselves because their education has focused so much on their weaknesses.
Many of the symptoms of ADHD can be seen as the side effects of deep imagination. For example, one symptom is “easily distracted by irrelevant thoughts.” This is an important stage of creativity called incubation, where you do not directly try to solve a problem but allow space for inspiration to occur.

The single most important factor in creating something new is imagination. All children have fantasies and those diagnosed with learning issues, like ADD and ADHD have lots of them. These can be a distraction, but can also give students the power to create a new world.

We need to educate creative minds by valuing creative minds, encouraging rather than discouraging imagination. We need to remind kids and parents that studying leads to good grades, thinking leads to problem solution, and imagination leads to world changers. This week, Dr. Lara Honos-Webb offers some tools to translate symptoms into needs and explains how you can give your child permission to meet those needs.

About the Guest Dr. Lara Honos-Webb

DR. LARA HONOS-WEBB is a worldwide ADD expert and offers ADD coaching. She is a clinical psychologist and author of The Gift of ADHD, The Gift of ADHD Activity Book, The Gift of Adult ADD, The ADHD Workbook for Teens and Listening to Depression: How Understanding Your Pain Can Heal Your Life.

Her work has been featured in Newsweek, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Prevention Magazine, The Chicago Tribune and Publisher’s Weekly as well as newspapers across the country and local and national radio and television. Honos-Webb completed a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship at University of California, San Francisco, and has been an assistant professor teaching graduate students. She has published more than 25 scholarly articles. Learn more about her work at: www.addisagift.com

When Dr. Niki Elliot I signed up for her first energy therapy training program, she knew very little about energy fields, chakras or what it meant to be an empathic intuitive. She was not drawn to the practice by an altruistic desire to heal others or change the world; rather, her focus was simply to stop feeling other people’s illnesses, pains and emotions in her own physical body. Some years later, her personal quest for energetic healing collided with her professional aspirations to build alternative learning environments for Twice Exceptional Children, those with very high cognitive ability who also present with behavior, mood or learning challenges like ADHD, Dyslexia, anxiety disorders, etc…

Today, she runs the The Innerlight Sanctuary, a healing arts center in California, where she and her team of certified practitioners composed of credentialed school teachers and counselors use The Inner Light Method, to help balance empathic and intuitive children and adults of all ages. They also help restructure learning environments to take into account the needs of energetically sensitive, empathic and intuitive children, believed to be 10-20% of children in schools today.

About the Guest Dr. Niki Elliott

Niki Elliott, Ph.D. is the founder of Innerlight Sanctuary, a healing arts center in Altadena, CA. She is a master energy therapist, speaker, and author of The Intuitive Mother: A 21-Day Spiritual Journey That Will Change Your Family Forever. She is the former host of the live radio show, “Nurturing Intuitive Children with Dr. Niki” on Dreamvisions 7 Radio. Dr. Niki and her team travel nationally to train teachers and therapists to implement energetic balancing in schools and private practice. Dr. Niki earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA. www.innerlightsanctuary.com

MetaMusic: Opening the Learning Door in the ADD Mind with Professor Barbara Bullard

Aired Thursday, 8 October 2015, 7:00 PM ET

Children are continuously bathed in an ocean of music and sound. Like the air in which it travels, it swirls unnoticed around them during the course of their day, they seem to carry it with them in their hearts as they play with their toys and their friends, and it’s a big part of what makes television interesting to them. But for many of them, music can be much more than just a friend; it can help them to awaken their unique brain structures, to coordinate their brain processing and to learn to study smarter, not harder.

Over the past 40 years, as both a teacher and a parent, Professor Barbara Bullard has been interested in discovering methods by which students might learn faster and more efficiently. Inspired by the techniques of ‘superlearning,’ which demonstrated the widespread neuronal impact of certain musical compositions on enhancing memory or peak performance states, led her over the past two decades to recommend background music as a key element in the application of superlearning. Reports received since 1994 indicate that Metamusic embedded with beta Hemi- Sync® patterns may also help with other learning disabilities, specifically dyslexia and slow reading development, both of which have as an underlying cause a disparity of errors in timing between the two hemispheres.

About the Guest Professor Barbara Bullard

Professor Barbara Bullard has worked as a Professor of Speech Communications at Orange Coast College for over 48 years. In addition to winning numerous awards, she is the co-author of Com-munication from the Inside Out, with Kat Carroll, and Remembrance: Journey to Expanded Learning with Dr. Alex Bennett. Her work as a teacher and a parent raising two children with Attention Deficit Disorder led her to become very interested in music as a universal means by which her students and children could overcome their learning challenges, improve their learning abilities, and heighten their performance in the educational setting. This interest eventually lead to a collaboration with the Monroe Institute. marrying musical formats with the binaural technol-ogy of Hemi-Sync, now known as “Metamusic,” which has proven to be extraordinarily helpful for the normative student as well as those with a variety of learning challenges – specificallyy ADD, ADHD, and Dyslexia.

It has become widely accepted that not all children learn alike. Some grasp information best by reading, while others learn better through listening or discovering concepts in a hands-on fashion. Longtime educator Mariaemma Willis says there are actually five aspects to a student’s learning style beyond the simple modes of visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Their “learning style profile” takes into account a child’s talents, interests, preferred learning environment, and disposition, as well as the three more familiar modes.

If you have or know a child who is struggling in school or has been labeled a “learning misfit”, join Sandie and guest Mariaemma Pellulo-Willis and discover the secret to helping them lose the labels and discover the joy of learning, simply by uncovering their individual learning style.

About Guest Mariaemma Pellulo-Willis

Mariaemma Pelullo-Willis, M.S. is an education consultant and LearningSuccess™ Coach. She is co-author of Discover Your Child’s Learning Style and Midlife Crisis Begins in Kindergarten and is co-founder of the LearningSuccess™ Institute where parents and teachers learn how to coach every child for learning success, and co-creator of Power of You Now! seminars for adults.

Before going into private practice, Mariaemma was the director of a private learning center for children with learning disabilities. After 13 years of assessing and treating children and adults for learning “dysfunctions” she knew that she could no longer follow this erroneous and harmful model of education and began researching alternatives. For the last 25 plus years her passion has been helping children and their families understand and appreciate their natural gifts and abilities, and helping adults recuperate from negative school experiences which keep them from discovering their passions and potentials. She has spent spent more than twenty-five years teaching, conducting workshops and seminars for parents and teachers, and developing educational programs and materials.

Every child is unique. That statement is so obvious that it’s almost ridiculous to say it. However, we usually speak about the uniqueness of our children by describing what they “do”—whether they’re good at sports or dancing, math or reading, etc. But according to this week’s guest, Connie Kaplan, there’s a great deal more to your child than what he or she does. This week, author Connie Kaplan will be sharing information that can help you understand the uniqueness of your child’s essence: his or her BEing-ness rather than his or her DOing-ness.

In her revolutionary book, The Invisible Garment: 30 Spiritual Principles that Weave the Fabric of Human Life, Connie Kaplan makes the radical suggestion that each person “signs a life contract at the moment of birth,” which contains a specific group of spiritual principles (or influences), and that throughout our lives we “wear” these principles like an invisible undergarment that constantly informs, guides, and girds us.
As a parent, says Kaplan, knowing your children’s spiritual garments gives you profound information, which can help you support their individuality and progress in life, ensuring that your parenting of each child becomes as individual as the child himself.

She is the author of several books, including a spiritual parenting manual, two books on dreaming, and The Invisible Garment: 30 Spiritual Principles that Weave the Fabric of Human Life.

About Guest Dr. Connie Kaplan

Dr. Connie Kaplan started her adult life in television production. By 1985, she was married to a wonderful man, had a beautiful family, lived in a great neighborhood, and had built an enviable career. In 1986 she was struck with a mysterious virus which rendered her almost helpless for two years. During this time, unable to work and incapable of handling normal life, she experienced a profound spiritual transformation which altered her inner experience and her outer expression of life.

She has shared the resulting spiritual insights in four books: The Invisible Garment, A Colorful Life, Dreams are Letters from the Soul, and A Woman’s Book of Dreams. She holds a Master’s degrees in Communications and Psychology and a Doctorate of Ministry. www.turtledreamers.com

What Does it Really Mean to be a Mother? A Birth Mother’s Tale of Adoption, Reunion, Separation and Growth with Kimberly Smythe

Aired Thursday, 17 September 2015, 7:00 PM ET

We’ve all witnessed emotional “adoption reunions” on daytime TV. But we rarely see what happens when the cameras stop rolling. How do two people, related by blood, but separated by circumstance, cope with trying to bridge the gap and forge a relationship after years of separation, while also endeavoring to get past any pain, guilt, blame and suffering each had experienced along the way.

Kimberly Smythe got pregnant at 16 and, certain that a married couple could do more for her beautiful little girl, than she could, gave her child up for adoption. 18 years later, Kim sought out her daughter, but sadly, their reunion was no fairytale.

Letting Go Again is the title of Kim’s book, which chronicles her journey through Adoption, Reunion, Separation and Growth. It’s a searing account that raises important questions about motherhood, the damaging effects of adoption, and our definition of family. In so doing it also challenges our perceptions about relationships, acceptance, surrender, and the true nature of love that finds the strength to let go…again.

About Guest Kimberly Smythe

Kimberly Smythe was born in Madrid, Spain. As a child, she moved home six times in eleven years. After living the nomadic life of an Air Force brat, she spent twenty-six years in Hawaii, which still holds a special place in her heart. She has four grown children, three of whom call her mom.

Kimberly chose to write about her first child, whom she gave up for adoption, so that others might understand what many women endure when circumstances force them to give up their child. Writing about being a birth mother, or as she prefers to call it, a natural mother, helped her in her quest for understanding. She hopes it will also help others understand what it is like to let go of a child, and then be reunited, only to have to let go again. www.lettinggoagain.com